Is there a Debian equivalent for "ubuntu brainstorm"?

I was wondering if there’s any equivalent for ubuntu brainstorm, i.e. an official place for contributing with ideas and suggestions about the project without needing to be a DD. I realize that Debian has mailing lists, but a website for brainstorming could probably be a better tool and provide a much better experience (just like ask.debian is doing for Debian related questions).

I think that this kind of tool could expand the contributions to the project beyond the DD realm, without jeopardizing the development of the Debian project.

Perhaps this could also be extremely useful with regard to the DEX initative and the Derivatives Front Desk.

In the end, it’s all about expanding the options for potential contributors to collaborate with the project. I’m sure that there must be lots of people that for different reasons can’t contribute in a traditional way (code, packaging, documentation, translation, etc) but that might be more than willing to contribute in other ways (for example, by sharing good ideas on how to improve Debian further).

3 answers

It would be much better to propose ideas to the upstream projects that your ideas are about.

For stuff that is specific to Debian it is best to propose those ideas on the mailing lists or in the bug tracker.

In any case an idea website quickly becomes less than useful if the developers of the software your idea is about are not looking at that website (which for upstream projects would probably be approximately zero developers). Getting the whole of the Debian project and every single FLOSS developer to look at the idea website would be almost impossible. The best it could be is a way for users to be lazy about where they are posting their ideas and then have more motivated users forward their ideas to the right place. Most ideas need clarification, expansion and implementation testing and this forwarding would just cause a disconnect between the person having the idea and the people who might be willing to implement the idea.

I think something like that on the Debian side doesn’t currently exist.

Currently, we have an infra-structure to submit enhancement proposal (ie. something more articulated than simple ideas, but less crowd-sourced) called DEP and reachable at http://dep.debian.net/

IMHO, it’s mainly used to formalize proposal and discussion which are carried on on debian-project or similar ML. It should be open to any contributor (but require permissions granted) but may need quite more technical details behind pure abstract ideas/requests.

Anyway, I agree with you that such a tool could be an interested experiment for the derivative frontdesk.